Chandrayaan-1

ISRO (India) · Orbiter · 2008Success

Mission ended Aug 29, 2009 (IST) when contact was lost 312 days in, with about 95% of objectives met; JPL ground radar located the derelict orbiter still circling at about 200 km in 2016-17.

Chandrayaan-1 was India's first mission to the Moon, and it delivered discovery far out of proportion to its roughly $78 million price: the NASA-built M3 spectrometer aboard found water and hydroxyl bound in sunlit lunar soil, its Moon Impact Probe struck the south polar highlands beside Shackleton crater, and its radar sniffed out polar ice. And no, NASA did not "find the lost Chandrayaan-1 alive" in 2017: ground radar proved the dead orbiter was still circling the Moon, a derelict located, not a spacecraft recovered.

Facts as of July 20, 2026, from the sources listed below.

1st

Indian mission to the Moon

instruments from India, the US, the UK, Germany, Sweden and Bulgaria

312days

in lunar orbit, of a planned two years

$78M

approximate mission cost (about Rs 3.8 billion)

The Moon through M3's eyes: blue marks the water and hydroxyl signature clinging to the high latitudes. Credit: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Brown Univ./USGS.

Commonly wrong. Four persistent errors in English coverage. (1) The 2017 story gets inflated: headlines like "NASA finds India's lost Moon mission" slide into implications that Chandrayaan-1 was recovered, recontacted or found operating. It was a ground-radar technique demonstration: the spacecraft has been dead since August 2009, the detection actually happened on July 2, 2016 (announced March 9, 2017), and nothing was or could be reactivated. (2) Water attribution flattens in both directions: "India discovered water on the Moon" and "NASA discovered water on the Moon" are both half-right. The headline discovery came from NASA's M3 instrument flying on India's spacecraft, published alongside corroborating Cassini and Deep Impact data, and it found hydroxyl and water molecules bound in sunlit soil, not liquid water or ice sheets; separately, ISRO's CHACE instrument measured water vapor during the impact probe's descent, announced only after the M3 result and peer-reviewed in 2010. (3) The impact coordinates are quoted as if settled: most pages carry 89.76 S, 39.40 W (the UN registration value), ISRO's own 2015 atlas says 89.54 S, 44.71 W, and the 2021 image-matching analysis puts Jawahar Point at about 89.55 S, 122.93 W on the Connecting Ridge; near the pole those longitudes are closer on the ground than they look, but mixing the estimates without dates is wrong, and the crater has never been found in LROC images. (4) "India's first Moon landing": the Moon Impact Probe was a deliberate hard impact, not a landing; India's first soft landing was Chandrayaan-3 in 2023, and India was the fifth space agency to reach the lunar surface (fourth nation to place its flag), after the USSR, the US, Japan and ESA.

01Mission facts

Launch	October 22, 2008, 00:52 UT, on PSLV-XL (flight C11) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota
Spacecraft	1,380 kg at launch, 700 W of power, designed for two years in a 100 km circular polar orbit
Mission cost	About Rs 3.8 billion (roughly $78 million at launch), which BBC noted was considerably less than Japan's and China's 2007 lunar orbiters
Instruments	11 from six countries: five Indian (TMC, HySI, LLRI, HEX and the Moon Impact Probe) plus NASA's M3 and Mini-SAR, the UK-led C1XS, Germany's SIR-2, Sweden's SARA and Bulgaria's RADOM
Moon Impact Probe	A 35 kg box carrying a descent camera, a radar altimeter and the CHACE mass spectrometer, with the Indian flag painted on its side panels; released November 14, 2008, it struck near Shackleton crater at 15:01 UT
Impact site (refined 2021)	About 89.55 S, 122.93 W, on the Earth-facing slope of the Connecting Ridge between Shackleton and De Gerlache craters; earlier published estimates (89.76 S, 39.40 W in the UN registration; 89.54 S, 44.71 W in ISRO's 2015 atlas) differ, and the crater itself has never been found in LROC images
M3 water discovery	OH and H2O absorption near 3 micrometers detected across sunlit soils, strongest toward the poles; published in Science online September 24, 2009 (Pieters et al.), alongside corroborating Cassini VIMS and Deep Impact observations
CHACE water vapor	The Moon Impact Probe's mass spectrometer measured water vapor in the thin sunlit lunar ambience during its 25-minute descent on November 14, 2008; the peer-reviewed result appeared in Planetary and Space Science in 2010 (Sridharan et al.)
Mini-SAR polar ice	Radar signatures consistent with water ice found in more than 40 small permanently shadowed craters (2 to 15 km) near the north pole, announced March 2010; NASA's estimate was at least 600 million metric tons
Mission end	Last contact at 20:00 UT on August 28, 2009 (01:30 IST August 29, the date ISRO uses); NASA credits the mission with at least 95% of its objectives
On-orbit tally	312 days in lunar orbit, more than 3,400 orbits of the Moon and over 70,000 images returned
Found again (2017)	JPL beamed microwaves at the Moon from the 70 m Goldstone dish and caught echoes at Green Bank: the derelict crossed the beam on July 2, 2016, still in a roughly 200 km polar orbit circling every 2 hours 8 minutes; announced March 9, 2017

Site: 89.5500°S, 122.9300°W · Jawahar Point (Jawahar Sthal), Earth-facing slope of the Connecting Ridge between Shackleton and De Gerlache craters (source)

02Mission timeline

22 Oct 2008
Launched at 00:52 UT on PSLV-C11 from Sriharikota, the first flight of the uprated PSLV-XL
8 Nov 2008
Enters lunar orbit: India's first spacecraft at the Moon
12 Nov 2008
Reaches its 100 km circular polar mapping orbit
14 Nov 2008
Moon Impact Probe strikes near Shackleton crater at 15:01 UT after a roughly 25-minute descent, imaging and sampling the exosphere all the way down
26 Apr 2009
Star tracker fails; ISRO flies on with gyroscopes plus antenna-pointing data and landmark imaging
19 May 2009
Orbit raised from 100 km to 200 km for wider-swath imaging and lunar gravity studies
28 to 29 Aug 2009
Contact lost abruptly (20:00 UT Aug 28; 01:30 IST Aug 29); the mission ends after 312 days
24 Sep 2009
The M3 water and hydroxyl result is published online in Science and announced by NASA
Mar 2010
Mini-SAR results announced: ice signatures in 40-plus shadowed north polar craters
2010
CHACE's in-descent water vapor measurement is published in Planetary and Space Science
2 Jul 2016
The derelict physically crosses a Goldstone-Green Bank radar beam above the lunar north pole, proving it is still in orbit (announced 9 Mar 2017)
Aug 2018
M3 data yields the first direct evidence of exposed water ice inside polar cold traps (Li et al., PNAS)
Mar 2021
LPSC analysis relocates the Moon Impact Probe's impact point to the Connecting Ridge slope at about 89.55 S, 122.93 W

Teal dots: events that physically happened in flight or on the Moon. Grey: announcements, namings, contracts, and targets.

03The mission

Chandrayaan-1 ('Moon craft' in Sanskrit) was India's first mission to the Moon, launched on October 22, 2008 at 00:52 UT from Sriharikota on PSLV-C11, the first flight of the uprated PSLV-XL that would later carry India's Mars Orbiter Mission. It arrived in lunar orbit on November 8 and settled into a 100 km circular polar orbit by November 12, joining the international return-to-the-Moon wave of the late 2000s alongside Japan's Kaguya and China's Chang'e 1. What set the 1,380 kg spacecraft apart was its manifest: 11 instruments from six countries, including NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) and Mini-SAR radar, European payloads from the UK, Germany and Sweden, and a Bulgarian radiation monitor, all flown for about Rs 3.8 billion, roughly $78 million.

Two days after reaching its mapping orbit, on November 14, 2008 (the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister), the spacecraft released its 35 kg Moon Impact Probe. Over a roughly 25-minute descent the probe took more than 3,000 images, measured its altitude by radar and sampled the wisp-thin lunar exosphere with its CHACE mass spectrometer before striking the south polar highlands beside Shackleton crater at 15:01 UT. The Indian flag was painted on its side panels, and Indian coverage marks the moment India became the fourth country to place its flag on the Moon; counting agencies whose hardware had reached the surface, it was the fifth, after the USSR, the US, Japan (Hiten, 1993) and ESA (SMART-1, 2006). The impact site is named Jawahar Point (Jawahar Sthal). Exactly where it lies took 13 years to pin down: the UN registration says 89.76 S, 39.40 W, ISRO's 2015 science atlas says 89.54 S, 44.71 W, and a 2021 analysis that matched the final probe images against LROC mosaics moved the point to about 89.55 S, 122.93 W on the Earth-facing slope of the Connecting Ridge between Shackleton and De Gerlache, terrain later studied for Artemis landings. The impact crater itself has never been identified in orbital imagery.

The science that made the mission famous arrived after the spacecraft died. On September 24, 2009, Science published the M3 team's detection of hydroxyl and water molecules bound in sunlit lunar soil, strongest toward the poles, corroborated in the same issue by re-examined Cassini and Deep Impact flyby data. ISRO could add a twist: CHACE had directly measured water vapor in the lunar ambience during the Moon Impact Probe's descent ten months earlier, a result announced only after NASA's and peer-reviewed in Planetary and Space Science in 2010. In March 2010, the Mini-SAR team reported radar signatures consistent with water ice in more than 40 permanently shadowed craters near the north pole, with a NASA estimate of at least 600 million metric tons. The thread kept running long afterward: in 2018, researchers using M3 data published the first direct evidence of exposed water ice inside polar cold traps, and Chandrayaan-1's Mini-SAR and M3 maps were among the datasets NASA weighed in aiming the LCROSS impact that excavated water from Cabeus in October 2009.

The flight itself was a fight. The star tracker failed on April 26, 2009, forcing ISRO to steer by gyroscopes, antenna-pointing data and landmark imaging. On May 19, 2009 the orbit was raised to 200 km, giving wider imaging swaths and cleaner gravity measurements. Then, abruptly, radio contact dropped at 20:00 UT on August 28, 2009 (01:30 IST on August 29, the date ISRO cites), and the mission was declared over: 312 days in lunar orbit instead of the planned two years, more than 3,400 orbits, over 70,000 images, and, by NASA's accounting, at least 95% of the mission objectives already met.

The strangest chapter came seven years later. In 2016, JPL tested whether ground radar could find small derelicts in lunar orbit, a hard problem because the Moon's lumpy gravity slowly scrambles old orbits and Chandrayaan-1 is a cube barely 1.5 meters across. The team transmitted microwaves from the 70 m Goldstone antenna and listened with the Green Bank Telescope, pointing just above the lunar north pole; on July 2, 2016 something crossed the beam on schedule, and repeated passes over three months confirmed it was Chandrayaan-1, still in a roughly 200 km polar orbit, circling every 2 hours and 8 minutes. The result, announced on March 9, 2017, was a technique demonstration for future mission planning, not a rescue: the spacecraft has been silent since 2009, and as of 2026 those radar echoes remain the last direct evidence of it. Its real afterlife is the program it started, which continued through Chandrayaan-2's orbiter and the Chandrayaan-3 landing of 2023, and the water story every south polar mission since has been chasing.

04In pictures

PSLV-C11 leaves Sriharikota with Chandrayaan-1, October 22, 2008. Credit: ISRO (GODL-India).

Chandrayaan-1 during pre-launch testing. Credit: ISRO (GODL-India).

The Moon Impact Probe is fitted to Chandrayaan-1 before launch. Credit: ISRO (GODL-India).

The 2016 radar echo: Chandrayaan-1 crossing the Goldstone beam over the lunar south pole, seven years after its last transmission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Water-bearing minerals (light blue) in the ejecta of a young far-side crater, as mapped by M3. Credit: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ..

Tap a photo to enlarge.

05Sources

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